At 10:12 on the morning of 28 December 1944, a Japanese A6M Zero dived through anti-aircraft fire and crashed into the Liberty ship SS John Burke in the Mindanao Sea. For a few seconds there was only smoke. Then her cargo of ammunition went up, and the ship disappeared under a mushroom cloud of fire and debris. None of the 68 men aboard survived.

The film of that moment is one of the most shocking pieces of footage of the Pacific War, and it circulates constantly on social media. Most of the posts get the core right. Several details, from the ship’s name to the death toll, are wrong.

An ammunition ship for Mindoro

John Burke was one of 2,710 Liberty ships, the mass-produced cargo carriers that moved the Allied war effort across the oceans. Built at Portland, Oregon, in just 33 days in late 1942, she was owned by the War Shipping Administration and run by the Northland Transportation Company of Seattle. She was a merchant ship, crewed by 40 civilian merchant mariners, with a US Navy Armed Guard of 28 (some sources say 29) to man her guns. Viral posts routinely call her the “USS” John Burke. She was never a Navy ship.

In late 1944 she loaded munitions at Guam for the American landings on Mindoro, the island US forces needed as an airfield base for the invasion of Luzon. She joined a resupply convoy that reached Leyte on the night of 27 December and then turned into the Mindanao Sea for Mindoro. The weather that morning was poor, and the escorts were told their air cover would not launch until it cleared.

Three Zeros from Cebu

The Japanese sent a small kamikaze flight from Cebu. According to Japanese records, the attackers were three A6M Zero fighters of the 201st Air Group, led by Lt. Masami Hoshino, each carrying a 250 kg bomb. They found the convoy through breaks in the cloud south of Cebu and Bohol.

One Zero, hit by anti-aircraft fire, kept coming and crashed into John Burke between her No. 2 and No. 3 cargo holds. Witnesses saw a brief flash, then smoke pouring from the hold, then a pillar of fire. Seconds later the cargo detonated. The blast rocked the whole convoy, with some ships reporting they had been torpedoed. A small US Army supply ship just astern of John Burke was so badly damaged that it sank before it could even be identified.

When the smoke cleared, nearby ships closed in to search for survivors. There were none. Friendly fighters arrived over the convoy only after noon, once the weather lifted.

What the viral version gets wrong

The Instagram-style retelling says the “USS” John Burke was hit “near Mindoro”, that more than 4,000 tons of explosives went up, that the blast was visible more than 35 miles away and that all 100 men aboard vanished. The record says otherwise on several counts. She was a merchant ship, not a Navy one. She was lost in the Mindanao Sea, well short of Mindoro. The death toll was 68, not 100. And neither the Navy’s own accounts nor the standard references give her cargo tonnage or a visibility distance.

The 4,000-ton figure looks borrowed from a different disaster. On 10 November 1944 the Navy ammunition ship USS Mount Hood blew up in Seeadler Harbor at Manus with about 3,800 tons of ordnance aboard, killing 372 people. Photographs of that explosion are frequently mixed up with the John Burke.

Not the last

The attacks on the Mindoro convoys went on for days. On 30 December kamikazes hit the PT-boat tender Orestes and the destroyers Gansevoort and Pringle, and the Liberty ships Hobart Baker and Simon G. Reed were lost to bombing. Then, on 4 January 1945, it happened again.

John Burke was one of three Liberty ships, and one of 47 ships in all, sunk by kamikaze attack in the Second World War. Her fragments lie about 1,500 feet down in the Mindanao Sea. The film of her final seconds remains the most vivid record of what a single aircraft could do to a ship full of ammunition.

Sources: Naval History and Heritage Command, H-Gram 040 (Samuel J. Cox) and H-Gram 039 on the loss of USS Mount Hood; Robert M. Browning Jr., U.S. Merchant Vessel War Casualties of World War II; Robin L. Rieley, Kamikaze Attacks of World War II; Wikipedia, “SS John Burke”.